On Jan. 6, 1944, Anne Frank wrote in her diary that her image of him was so vivid she didn't need a photograph to remember him.

Indeed, more than 60 years later, no photograph had been found of Anne Frank's childhood sweetheart, leaving hundreds of readers around the world curious for a glimpse. But now, 81-year-old Earnst Michaelis has identified his dearest childhood friend, Peter Schiff, as the "Petel" or "Peter" from the diary the mysterious boy who stole Anne Frank's heart.

Despite "Anne Frank's Diary" becoming one of the world's most-read journals, selling an estimated 35 million copies, what Peter Schiff might have looked like was an enduring mystery. He met Anne Frank at school in Amsterdam in 1940, and they were inseparable

According to officials at the Anne Frank House, the record books show that Peter Schiff died May 31, 1945 in Auschwitz, four months after the liberation of the camp, and a few months after Anne Frank's own death, of typhus, in Bergen-Belsen. They were respectively 18 and 16 at the time.

“...Ive been in enough bars in Germany as a US serviceman (and being a big blue-eyed Aryan myself)to know that the anti-semetism is deep and wide.”

Maybe you hang out in the wrong kind of bars. But give some Germans some credit for risking their necks and giving their lives in opposing Hitler. From Dietrich Bonhoffer to the (”jew-looking”) Field Marshal von Manstein there were Germans who repudiated Hitler and his quack racial views.

32
posted on 02/26/2008 10:05:09 AM PST
by Monterrosa-24
(...even more American than a French bikini and a Russian AK-47.)

I would like to believe that, but that’s just a nice tale we told ourselves so we could align with the Germans against Stalin.

They knew; they participated (as did many of the French elite and others).

Yes, there are notable exceptions -— the freemasons, many Roman Catholics, and many other groups were extremely helpful to Jews fleeing Germany.

I don’t know about the fertilizer, but families all over Germany who were getting bombed/having shortages made up for it with excellent furniture and furnishings “liberated” from Jewish families (and others) all over Europe.

I read it in a history of the war, years ago, and do not remember where.
It took years for Germany to recover from the war. Even in the early ‘70s there were bomb and shell damaged buildings. The white marbled buildings from the Third Reich era were landmarks. We returned years later and saw familiar buildings with the marble facades removed, and every evidence of shell damage covered up. Along with cosmetic changes, the war generation has disapeared or died off. With that the feel of the country has changed. Germany has lost that feeling of the war having just ended...
We had worked along side with some of that generation, and worked in Germany in an atmosphere of the country still getting back on it’s feet.
No thinking person could be there without wanting to understand how these things came to be, without seeing what the war had done to the German soul. We knew former Nazi’s trying to hide their past. (Nazi by association) Now their children were coming of age and asking questions. And the children became adults trying to understand what their parents had done. Most people refused to talk about the war, common to hear “We didn’t know, etc.”, and sometimes heart wrenching stories of seeing terrible things, but being helpless.
Their blood, the Nazi’s and their victims, cries out from the ground, “Look at what we have done! Do not go where we have gone!”
When we try to clean up history because the truth is so ugly, we silence those voices.

44
posted on 02/26/2008 1:25:24 PM PST
by WestwardHo
(Whom the god would destroy, they first drive mad.)

How cute. We visited Anne Frank house in 1980. It was a very moving experience. I do not know HOW they managed to live there so long, all those people plus a cat. It had to be so difficult. Such an ugly mark on Human History... the Nazis and Hitler.

46
posted on 02/27/2008 4:28:18 AM PST
by buffyt
(Obama threw his turban into the presidential campaign ring! If he wins ATLAS WILL SHRUG!)

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